Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Running a World Café

I volunteered to run a World Café, themed around
Organisational Impediments and how to solve them, for my local agile Meet-Up group ‘Brisbane Agile’*

I deliberately kept my preparation to a minimum. I held some
discussions with the Meet-Up Organiser, regarding how we would run the event
and set up the room. Apart from that I created a few wall charts to help smooth
out proceedings and came up with some sample Organisational Impediments. These
were a backup in case the participants were reluctant to volunteer their own
items for discussion. This word document contains the
wall charts I used.

We set up the room with five groups of tables that seated
about six people each. Seating for thirty people was wishful thinking, by the
start time we had two full tables. The low numbers were probably due to the
event being event in the Christmas season.

While guests were entering and eating the free pizza, I
wondered around introduced myself. Asking what had brought them here and
suggesting that they post their question or topic on the provided wall charts.
From member I think we ended up with eight topics being suggested by the
participants.

After brief introductions from our sponsor and the meet-up
organiser, I got everyone on their feet and used dot voting to select two of the
eight suggested topics. There were a couple of clear winners, which made it
easy to start the two tables discussing each topic.

As a group we decided as a group to drop down to ten minute
discussion rounds. This allowed us to get through four topics in total.

I time boxed us to ten minutes of discussion, followed by a
couple of minutes to switch tables and then another ten minutes of discussion. The
conversations that occurred where very animated. It was a real struggle to stop
them and get us on to the next round. After the first topics had been discussed
by both groups we had the topic leader provide a quick overview which sparked even
more discussion.

With roughly half of our planned time used up we used dot
voting again to select another two topics and do it all again. Again we had
very energetic discussions, which were constrained by the ten minute boundary.

The result was these sheets of butchers paper, which fail to
convey the excitement and energy that was in the room.

Result: Agile Contract Models

Result: Introducing Agile into a large organisation

Result: What is more effective Scrum of Iterative Waterfall and Why?

Result: Agile estimation

We ended up with some very satisfied attendees. Some left
with a much better understanding of agile, another walked away with an action
plan for how he will sell agile to the management group in the company he has
just joined. Everyone seemed to walk away happy.

I whole heartedly recommend you to run your own World Café;
it is easy to set up, exciting and harness the energy of the participants.

*At the time of the World Café it was actually a separate
group ‘Brisbane Scrum and Agile’ Group, however it has since merged with the
‘Brisbane Lean and Agile’ group to become ‘Brisbane Agile’.